Enclosure by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester

Those who are the ready champions of the rights of the people to the common lands, and who justly inveigh against all encroachments, must feel bound to admit that, in the case of Greenwich Park, what they would call pilfering in other instances is thoroughly justified. The land which forms the Park was part of Blackheath until Henry VI., in the fifteenth year of his reign, gave his uncle Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, licence to enclose 200 acres of the wood and heath "to make a park in Greenwich."